Getting selected culture from a drop-down in another zone

Pretty much what's in the title. I need to test each item of a list against a value out of a drop-down in the CulturePicker zone. My initial attempts of WorkContext.Layout.CulturePickerZone.Widgets[0].CulturePickerPart.UserCulture.Value aren't exactly working...
so what's the proper way to access this data?

Yes, that would be too brittle anyways. You should probably have something playing the role of intermediary there. Maybe a handler could watch the creation of the shape and put the data you need on context.Items for example?

Brittle because I can think of at least half a dozen ways this could get broken, leaving the user wondering why this other, unrelated thing started to break all of a sudden.

In any case, there is such a simpler solution that I want to kick myslef for not thinking about it first. What you need here is just the current culture, so just ask the work context to give you an instance of ICultureSelector and get the culture from there.
It will work with Culture Picker, or with any other implementation.

I guess I really need to do this work within a proper build of Orchard in VS.. Intellisense led me to WorkContext.CurrentCulture, which seems to be giving me just what I want.. is this a "stable" solution?